The bullet struck the president on the left side of the head. Felix was standing beside him when it happened, and a little spray of blood spattered onto his shirt. President Matheson pirouetted and began to stumble out into the street, fully exposed to the gunfire that ripped pavement and plinked dead cars and shot out the windows of shops.
Felix took a step after him. Maggie snatched his shirt collar and dragged him back into the doorway where they’d been hiding.
“Don’t be stupid!” she said angrily, blood seeping from a forehead scrape she’d gotten from a fall.
“It’s the…” Felix began, but stopped himself.
The trio of Tin Men were already out on the street, flanking Matheson, hustling him back toward the open doorway. Blood streamed down the left side of his face but he was alive. Felix stared, trying to make sense of it, and as the robots pushed Matheson into the doorway he saw the furrow along the man’s skull and realized the bullet had only grazed him. The skin had been torn open and the blood flowed, but his brains were still inside his head.
“What now?” Felix asked, turning to Syd, the ranking Secret Service agent left alive.
Syd gave an angry look. “Same as the last hour. Stay alive.”
There were fourteen of them now—President Matheson, three Tin Men, four staffers, three flesh-and-blood Secret Service agents, President Rostov and his bodyguard, and Felix. Of all of them, Felix felt the most expendable, and that feeling haunted him. It crawled underneath his skin like tiny metal ants, able to magnetically attract bullets. Yet he’d been expecting death ever since they’d left the hotel and somehow he still lived. For Kate, he kept moving. Nobody had handed him a gun yet, but he felt sure it would come to that. What he would do with one he had no idea.
The ground shook from an explosion not far off and Felix gritted his teeth. There had been so many that he ought to have been used to it by now. Instead, it frightened him more deeply every time. One of the Secret Service agents snapped at the aides to stay back. Rostov’s bodyguard said nothing, only ducked his head out into the street then pulled back in, expression grimmer than ever.
Rostov stood staring at the three Tin Men clustered around the president. For a second, his gaze flickered toward Felix and something passed between them—perhaps a mutual acknowledgment that if Matheson died, the protection they’d received so far would evaporate. At least you have your bodyguard, Felix thought. The ugly, granite-faced Russian seemed to have no problem with the idea of dying for his president. Felix didn’t want to die for anyone.
Especially not in a dress boutique full of colorfully clad mannequins.
“Come on!” Jun cried out. “We can’t just stay here!”
Syd turned to face him, blond hair bedraggled with sweat. “The president is down, kid. Nobody—”
“Scratch that,” a deep voice said, and they all turned to see Chapel, the leader of the president’s Tin Men detachment, stepping away from the others. “The president is up.”
Matheson had stitches in the side of his scalp. The blood had stopped flowing but still smeared his temple and cheek. He glanced around, clearly disoriented, but then Bingham—the female among the bots—took his arm and guided him to Felix.
The robot stared into his eyes. “Minor concussion. Maybe worse. Stay with him and we’ll try this again.”
Felix nodded and then they were all in motion. Chapel and Bingham went to the open doorway and the gunfire aimed at them started up again. The rest of them stayed back. Felix felt the president’s grip on his arm tighten and he turned to see a dazed, frantic light in Matheson’s eyes.
“They don’t know it’s us, Felix,” Matheson said. “Rostov and me. If they did, this whole building would already be down. You hear all of those other explosions, the rest of the gunfire? Right now they’re hunting everyone from the conference, trying to make sure we’re dead. But that’s going to be over soon and then they’ll be more thorough. This is our one chance.”
“I’m with you, Peter,” Felix said, hoping he sounded comforting, worried now about the extent of this concussion.
Matheson cupped a hand on the back of Felix’s neck and drew him close. Eye to eye, it was plain that the man still had his wits about him, though he seemed in pain.
“I’m sorry,” the president said.
The three Tin Men stepped out into the street and opened fire, Bingham and Marquez in one direction and Chapel in the other. They shouted for the others to go, and Felix’s legs were in motion before he could command them to stop. Syd and the other Secret Service agents surrounded him and Matheson, with Rostov and his bodyguard just behind, followed by three of the aides. The fourth aide, a pale and lanky man Felix couldn’t have named, remained in the recessed doorway and only shook his head in refusal as the rest of them departed. Nobody shouted at him to follow or tried to get back to force him. He had made his choice.
Felix’s final glimpse of that aide, ghostly as he slipped back into the shadows of the shop, would remain with him until his last breath.
Maggie began to shout over the gunfire. Jun held her hand and they ducked down low as they ran. Felix had President Matheson’s arm and they hid behind the Tin Men as they raced diagonally across the street toward the darkened entrance of a Metro station whose cavernous mouth offered the promise of quiet and refuge.
Bullets strafed one of the Secret Service agents just as he came abreast of Rostov, his presence saving the life of the Russian president in an irony that made Felix want to weep. Rostov’s bodyguard took a bullet to the shoulder but instead of slowing him it sped him up. He grabbed Rostov’s arm and rushed him forward, hurling the two of them into the open Metro stairwell. Felix and Matheson followed a moment later with the others on their heels. Last inside were Bingham and Chapel, who turned to shout at Marquez that they were clear—they were safe.
A rocket struck ten feet from Marquez, blowing him back along the road. The explosion brought concrete dust raining down on their heads in the Metro stairwell and blew in windows across the street. Felix held his breath as he watched Marquez rise to his feet, turn, and begin to return fire.
The second rocket hit him dead center, blew apart his carapace, and ignited his power core, which went up with a muffled crump of metal and enough force that it knocked Maggie and Jun off their feet. The president stumbled but Felix kept him from falling as they all began shuffling down the stairs into the darkness, nearly tripping over several terrified people who had taken shelter there.
“Bingham, take point!” Chapel ordered.
As she moved ahead of them, her chest plate blossomed with illumination so bright that the people sheltered on the stairs threw up their hands to shield their eyes. The guide light turned the stairs into a dusty gloom that made Felix think of a shipwreck deep on the ocean floor. They began to descend into that eerie void with the echo of Marquez’s death still ringing in their ears.
Eleven left, Felix thought.
The president tumbled on the stairs, squeezing his eyes shut and opening them several times in a row as if trying to clear his vision. Chapel hustled along behind them, his own guide light coming to brilliant life in the darkness.
Felix glanced back up at the square of rapidly diminishing sunlight they’d left behind and felt the concrete closing in around him. He’d thought the Metro station would provide them a quiet refuge, but now he reminded himself that the same could be said of a tomb.
They reached the station lobby and hurried over the turnstiles, down another flight of stairs. Syd stopped at the edge of the platform. Rostov and his bodyguard didn’t even slow. They clambered down and dropped to the subway tracks, then turned to stare at Chapel. No one acknowledged that Matheson’s injury had called his leadership into question, but they all recognized it.
“We must make it to Piraeus, get to open ocean,” Rostov said. “The only way we get out of here is on something with sails.”
“So which way?” Syd asked.
Bingham jumped down to the tracks and turned left. “Port of Piraeus is this way.”
“You sure?” Chapel asked.
Bingham glanced at him and Felix saw that in the depths of the subterranean darkness, their eyes were bright.
“All right,” Chapel said, pointing. “That way.”
The Tin Men helped Matheson down to the tracks as Felix sat on the platform and slid himself off, taking care not to twist an ankle. He didn’t want to be left behind like the ghost in the dress shop doorway.
Finding himself once more partnered with Matheson, Felix held his arm and helped him stumble quickly along the tracks, but his thoughts were plagued by something the man had said—something that had rung false even then.
“You have Tin Men with you, Mr. President,” Felix whispered to him, eardrums still thrumming from the hellish noises they’d endured. “You don’t think they knew who they were shooting at?”
Matheson looked at him, features bathed in the light that came from Chapel’s chest as the robot guarded their flank.
“Felix,” Matheson said.
“Professor Wade is right,” Chapel said. “The word will have gone out. If they have communications of any kind, they’ve got to be limited, but the shooters up there were trying to keep us pinned down, waiting for backup. Once it gets here they’ll be after us.”
Rostov had stopped ahead of them. “Don’t despair,” he said. “An hour ago, most of you thought you would not live another hour. Let’s see how we’ve fared an hour from now.”
As they all set off into the darkness with Bingham’s guide light leading the way, Maggie fell into step beside Felix and tapped him on the arm.
“Hey,” she whispered. “How screwed are we when the Russian president is our resident optimist?”
Aimee and North stood in a corridor near the Command Core with Major Zander. He had an office somewhere nearby but didn’t seem inclined to invite them for tea.
“What happened to chain of command?” Zander asked, fixing Aimee with a hard glare. They had drawn him out of a meeting for a quiet word and he was impatient.
“Yes, sir, it’s only that—”
“Sabotage trumps chain of command,” North said.
Aimee shot North a look. First he’d wanted her to do the talking, but now—what? He wanted the glory? When had he ever been gung ho about anything other than a drink or a great set of tits?
“You’re talking about Staging Area 12?” Major Zander asked, eyes narrowed. “Those deaths weren’t an accident?”
“I don’t believe so, sir,” Aimee replied.
Major Zander normally kept a fairly icy façade in place, but for just a moment it broke. Anger and frustration brought color to his cheeks and he glanced at the ground for a brief moment.
“Son of a bitch,” he whispered, just loud enough for them to hear.
North let out a huff of breath. “We’ll get the bastard, sir. You give the word and I’ll put a gun to every head if I have to. Whatever it takes to figure out who’s behind it.”
The ice returned to Major Zander’s eyes. “I don’t condone that cowboy shit, Private. You could’ve been more help in the field today with your platoon instead of leaving your bot to gather dust because you soiled your canister. I’m sure they could’ve used you. Can I assume you were assigned a task?”
Aimee saw North’s jaw working as he tried to contain his reaction—embarrassment or anger, maybe both—but then he nodded.
“Inventory, sir.”
“Then get back to it. We have an entire security team to handle this. I’m going to put them on it. They may want to speak with you, but otherwise you are not to discuss your suspicions with anyone else. We have enough goddamn problems down here.”
With a short nod toward Aimee, Major Zander turned and strode back toward the Hub. Aimee didn’t even have to look at North to know he was fuming; she could practically feel the anger emanating from him.
“I don’t expect him to kiss my ring,” North muttered, “but Jesus.”
“Pretty sure he’s got other things on his mind,” she said.
“He’s still a dick.”
Aimee shrugged. “But he’s right. We’ve all got jobs to do and mine isn’t to play Nancy Drew. I’m supposed to be at my station, trying to find an open channel.”
North shot her a dark look. “What’s stopping you?”
She held up her hands. “Okay. I guess we all have a right to be assholes today, but you go be one somewhere else.”
With a scowl, North turned on his heel and started along the corridor, heading away from the Hub.
“Aren’t you supposed to be doing inventory?” Aimee asked. “You’re not going to get to the kitchen or the storerooms that way.”
North paused, his back to her, but he had his head cocked slightly so she could just make out his profile. She didn’t like what she saw there. Whatever had happened in the field to change him, North had developed a dark streak, a twisted knot of fear and self-loathing that seemed to run deep.
“Need to clear my head,” he said, and then off he went, without looking back.
“I’ll say,” she muttered to herself.
But as she walked away, the image of his profile lingered in her mind and she found her thoughts following a path that made a chill grip her spine. Just how dark was North’s dark streak, really? It would have embarrassed her to admit how little she actually knew a guy with whom she’d had sex several dozen times.
Don’t be stupid. You know him well enough. You saw him grieving.
Still, the look on his face began to haunt her, and he had ignored Major Zander’s order to return to inventory. Even the most disgruntled soldier did not disobey a direct order without a better reason than a need to clear his head.
Her skin felt flushed as she hurried along the catwalk, moving as quickly as she could without breaking into a run. Several soldiers cast odd glances her way as she passed but by the time she reached the stairs that led down toward her station there were very few people around.
Quieting the panic in her heart, she rushed to her station. Focused on their own tasks and worries, her fellow tech-monkeys paid little attention to her. Aimee sat down, ignoring her headset and the job she was supposed to be returning to—the quiet crackle of what might have been an open channel to Vancouver would have to wait. Instead, she tapped at her keyboard, plugged in her access code, and started to scan the live surveillance video of the corridor where she and North had parted ways. That particular spoke led to the Staging Areas for the Eighth Battalion and the expansion currently under construction for the Thirteenth.
Shifting from camera to camera, she was able to search the corridor but saw no sign of North. Who did he know in the Eighth Battalion?
“Where the hell are you?” she whispered.
A commotion began to stir several stations away and she glanced over to see people gathered in front of a screen, watching the battle that continued aboveground. Either Major Zander had changed his stance on confining the video feed to the Core or someone was breaking the rules. From the troubled expressions on the pale faces of her colleagues, she knew the attack had not been repelled, but the tension in them also told her that the fight had not been decided yet. People were dying up there, both allies and enemies, and the knowledge fueled her purpose. People had died down below as well, and if there were enemies here, she wanted them exposed.
Surfing through camera feeds from the Eighth Battalion’s staging areas, she saw no sign of North, but he could have been in the bathroom or something.
She kept coming back to that look on his face, that grim profile. As much as it had been full of fear and frustration, there had been purpose in it, too. Purpose and pain and something else as well—regret. Perhaps even guilt.
Someone cheered over at the other station, people not doing their jobs but instead focusing on the topside battle. She glanced at her headset—they weren’t the only ones ignoring their duties, but she couldn’t shake the fear that had taken hold of her. Paranoia? Perhaps, but so be it. If there was ever a day to be paranoid, this was it.
She scanned the corridor again. The one other place he could be was in one of the unfinished Staging Areas for the Thirteenth Battalion, and there were no slumbering soldiers there, nobody he could hurt…if he had been the saboteur. What harm could he do?
Aimee felt sick. No way. He has no access. He’s a Tin Man, not a tech.
Still, she switched over to view the unfinished Staging Areas. All work had stopped this morning when the shit had hit the fan and so the place was truly empty, the lights dimmed. All three of those sprawling rooms looked the same, full of the tech that would serve as the foundation for the new canisters that would be brought in, but each with several monitoring stations already in place.
In Staging Area 32, one of the monitors glowed blue in the otherwise shadowy room and a figure sat before it, tapping away at the keyboard. Aimee zoomed in on the live feed to confirm what she already knew.
North.
How the hell had he even accessed the station? He’d have needed an authorization code and, from there, at least a fundamental knowledge of how to navigate through the Hump’s operational systems. The USARIC didn’t train their soldiers for that. And what was he up to?
“Okay,” she whispered. “You want to play?”
She had seen the anguish in him when he realized that his platoon had been cut off, that their minds were trapped inside their bots, and his pain when he’d discovered that four of them had died after that sabotage had clearly been real as well.
But did that mean he hadn’t been the one responsible?
There weren’t a lot of things Aimee Bell was good at. She’d tried sports and musical instruments and dance and theater as a little girl and sucked at all of them. She couldn’t really even tell a story or a joke without fumbling along and blowing the punchline. Her flirting skills were painful. But this? Making a computer do her bidding? She was a virtuoso.
Her fingers worked the keyboard. With a final tap, she summoned an image to her top screen—live video showing North’s face, hard at work. Every monitoring station had a camera for face-to-face communication, but they could be made to work in more than one direction if you knew the right codes. She slipped on her headphones and listened to him cursing quietly to himself, staring at the pained expression on his face. North looked frightened and loaded with regret, so pale she thought he might throw up.
“I’m going to Hell,” she heard him whisper. And on-screen, she saw a twisted, frantic smile part his lips. “Fuck, I’m already there.”
Working fast—speed had to be everything right now—she hacked his station. It was the sort of thing she had been doing since the age of twelve and it would’ve scared the shit out of her bosses. If her superiors ever had any idea how easy it was for Aimee and people like her to manipulate their systems, they’d never have hired them. Historically, governments and armies did not like to place their trust in people who were so obviously smarter than they were.
Her lower screen showed every one of North’s keystrokes. Aimee frowned as she studied the unfamiliar options on display, but it took her only a moment to understand what North had been doing instead of trying to clear his head. The Hump had been on lockdown since the Pulse. Now, with the airfield under attack by what the CO had estimated to be as many as six hundred heavily armed anarchists, the son of a bitch was trying to cancel the Phoenix Protocols so he could release the door locks and make the elevators function again.
She held her breath, staring at the screen, then lifted her gaze to study the desperation etched in North’s face. However many anarchists were out there, he intended to let them in.
Not a fucking chance.
The stale underground air seemed to fuzz with static. She ignored North’s desperate eyes on her top screen and focused on the bottom. Wings of panic spread and fluttered in her chest but she forced her hands to remain steady as she typed in codes that broke a dozen rules. She’d already hacked the monitoring station North had commandeered, and it wasn’t difficult to take it one step further.
With a final click of the mouse, she took over his station, slaving its functions to her own.
She glanced at the upper screen, taking grim satisfaction in the bafflement on North’s face. Frowning, he glared at his workstation and kept typing and trying the mouse. The screen he had been looking at would be frozen. When he attempted to start the process over again or reboot his workstation…
North slid back from the station and threw his hands in the air. She couldn’t hear him swearing but she could read the words on his lips and knew what he had just seen. His screen had gone dark.
“Bastard,” Aimee whispered, dropping her gaze to her lower screen.
It took her thirteen seconds to abort the complicated process North had begun. Even as she did so, her thoughts whirled. However North had gotten into the system, he’d had access codes—some kind of authorization. As fast as it occurred to her, Aimee quickly reset the administrative passwords for the Hump’s defensive and surveillance systems. With every keystroke, she felt the weight of her actions closing in around her. She’d done the only thing she could think of to safeguard the base. She’d have to face the consequences later.
“Choudhry! Parker!” she called, barely looking up. “Get over here!”
Heart pounding, she stared at the lower screen and forced herself to calm down. Had she done everything possible to keep him from trying again? Breathe, she told herself. Think.
Her fingers rested on the keypad and she stared at them for a second or two as a terrible question occurred to her. What if he hadn’t had a real authorization code at all? What if he’d found a backdoor in the system?
North? she thought. Even if there is a backdoor, how could he have found it?
She glanced to her right, over at the distant workstation where people had gathered to watch the battle raging topside, making her question her doubts. Whoever the anarchists were out there—the people killing Americans practically over her head—North had been working with them.
She swore loudly and started typing again, blinking, thinking too fast. If the system had a backdoor, she had to find it and close it or at least alter it enough that nobody else would be able to use it, not North and not the killers assaulting the airfield right now.
“Choudhry!” she shouted, with another quick glance.
This time, Warrant Officer Arun Choudhry seemed to hear her, even turned her way, but something caught Aimee’s eye and she pulled her attention away from him. She ceased breathing a moment as she gazed at the upper screen, which showed the workstation North had commandeered. The chair he’d been sitting in was empty.
Aimee felt as if some kind of bubble had formed around her. Caught up in the shock of North’s treason, frantic to stop him, she’d ignored everyone else. Parker and Choudhry and the rest were focused on the enemy attacking from outside while she had been fighting the one within.
“Goddamn it, Choudhry!” she screamed, hating the edge of panic in her voice.
Thoughts in chaos, she snatched up the headset from her station, tapped a key to open an internal line, and stared at the empty chair on her upper screen. How long since he’d been gone? Where would he hide?
“Command Core. Corporal Collins.”
Aimee tapped the side of her headset. “Collins, this is Warrant Officer Aimee Bell. I need Major Zander immediately.”
Something shifted beside her and she glanced up to see that an irritated Choudhry had at last torn himself away from the combat spectators down the row. He looked pissed, but must have seen the sincerity of her panic because his expression softened and he mouthed a question: What’s going on?
“In case you didn’t know, Bell,” Collins said, “we’re a little busy up—”
“We’ve got an enemy inside, Corporal. Put him on.”
“I think Command Core would know if there’d been a breach.”
“I’m not talking about—”
“Look, he’s in the middle of something. It’ll take you two minutes to walk over here. You want his attention, you’re more likely to get it face-to-face.”
She whipped off her headset and threw it at the workstation. Rising, she turned to look at the surprise on Choudhry’s face. His rich brown eyes were narrowed.
“What?” he asked.
“We’ve got a traitor down here. Private Tom North.”
“North?” Choudhry echoed dubiously.
She pointed to her station, already moving away. “Start tracking back the surveillance on Staging Area 13 and you’ll find it. And watch that screen! You see anything weird, report it to Command Core.”
“You were just on with them and they weren’t listening,” he said as she raced away.
At the metal stairs, she turned to call back over her shoulder. “They’re going to have to listen.”
A hundred thoughts filled her mind as she ran along the catwalk. Faces turned to watch her go, brows knitted in concern. If enough time passed, some of the people down here were going to unravel, no matter how well trained. She wondered if they thought it had already happened to her.
Fifty feet from the Command Core, she spotted Chief Schuler standing in front of the doors with Kenny Wheeler and a security officer she didn’t recognize. When Schuler spotted her approaching, his back stiffened and his eyes went cold. She’d always had the impression he didn’t like her very much, but there was something different about this. A tiny alarm began to jangle in her head.
“That’s close enough, Bell,” Chief Schuler said.
Aimee froze ten steps away from them, reading his tone and the body language from the security officer. Kenny Wheeler’s facial expression told the rest of the story.
“I know the identity of our saboteur, sir,” she said.
“Yes,” Schuler said. “So do we.”
The doors to the Command Core slid open and Major Zander stepped out with North right behind him. North looked at her with a mixture of pity and disgust that made her scream inside.
“Corporal,” Major Zander said to the security officer, “put Warrant Officer Bell in a hole so dark that mushrooms will grow out of her goddamn eyes.”